Subtitles and Transcript

Alex Wissner-Gross

0:11
Intelligence -- what is it?If we take a look back at the historyof how intelligence has been viewed,one seminal example has beenEdsger Dijkstra's famous quote that"the question of whether a machine can thinkis about as interestingas the question of whether a submarinecan swim."Now, Edsger Dijkstra, when he wrote this,intended it as a criticismof the early pioneers of computer science,like Alan Turing.However, if you take a look backand think about what have beenthe most empowering innovationsthat enabled us to buildartificial machines that swimand artificial machines that [fly],you find that it was only through understandingthe underlying physical mechanismsof swimming and flightthat we were able to build these machines.And so, several years ago,I undertook a program to try to understandthe fundamental physical mechanismsunderlying intelligence.

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Let's take a step back.Let's first begin with a thought experiment.Pretend that you're an alien racethat doesn't know anything about Earth biologyor Earth neuroscience or Earth intelligence,but you have amazing telescopesand you're able to watch the Earth,and you have amazingly long lives,so you're able to watch the Earthover millions, even billions of years.And you observe a really strange effect.You observe that, over the course of the millennia,Earth is continually bombarded with asteroidsup until a point,and that at some point,corresponding roughly to our year, 2000 AD,asteroids that are ona collision course with the Earththat otherwise would have collidedmysteriously get deflectedor they detonate before they can hit the Earth.Now of course, as earthlings,we know the reason would bethat we're trying to save ourselves.We're trying to prevent an impact.But if you're an alien racewho doesn't know any of this,doesn't have any concept of Earth intelligence,you'd be forced to put togethera physical theory that explains how,up until a certain point in time,asteroids that would demolish the surface of a planetmysteriously stop doing that.And so I claim that this is the same questionas understanding the physical nature of intelligence.

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So in this program that I
undertook several years ago,I looked at a variety of different threadsacross science, across a variety of disciplines,that were pointing, I think,towards a single, underlying mechanismfor intelligence.In cosmology, for example,there have been a variety of
different threads of evidencethat our universe appears to be finely tunedfor the development of intelligence,and, in particular, for the developmentof universal statesthat maximize the diversity of possible futures.In game play, for example, in Go --everyone remembers in 1997when IBM's Deep Blue beat
Garry Kasparov at chess --fewer people are awarethat in the past 10 years or so,the game of Go,arguably a much more challenging gamebecause it has a much higher branching factor,has also started to succumbto computer game playersfor the same reason:the best techniques right now
for computers playing Goare techniques that try to maximize future optionsduring game play.Finally, in robotic motion planning,there have been a variety of recent techniquesthat have tried to take advantageof abilities of robots to maximizefuture freedom of actionin order to accomplish complex tasks.And so, taking all of these different threadsand putting them together,I asked, starting several years ago,is there an underlying mechanism for intelligencethat we can factor outof all of these different threads?Is there a single equation for intelligence?

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And the answer, I believe, is yes.
["F = T ∇ Sτ"]What you're seeing is probablythe closest equivalent to an E = mc²for intelligence that I've seen.So what you're seeing hereis a statement of correspondencethat intelligence is a force, F,that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action.It acts to maximize future freedom of action,or keep options open,with some strength T,with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S,up to some future time horizon, tau.In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped.Intelligence tries to maximize
future freedom of actionand keep options open.And so, given this one equation,it's natural to ask, so what can you do with this?How predictive is it?Does it predict human-level intelligence?Does it predict artificial intelligence?So I'm going to show you now a videothat will, I think, demonstratesome of the amazing applicationsof just this single equation.

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(Video) Narrator: Recent research in cosmologyhas suggested that universes that producemore disorder, or "entropy," over their lifetimesshould tend to have more favorable conditionsfor the existence of intelligent
beings such as ourselves.But what if that tentative cosmological connectionbetween entropy and intelligencehints at a deeper relationship?What if intelligent behavior doesn't just correlatewith the production of long-term entropy,but actually emerges directly from it?To find out, we developed a software enginecalled Entropica, designed to maximizethe production of long-term entropyof any system that it finds itself in.Amazingly, Entropica was able to passmultiple animal intelligence
tests, play human games,and even earn money trading stocks,all without being instructed to do so.Here are some examples of Entropica in action.

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Just like a human standing
upright without falling over,here we see Entropicaautomatically balancing a pole using a cart.This behavior is remarkable in partbecause we never gave Entropica a goal.It simply decided on its own to balance the pole.This balancing ability will have appliactionsfor humanoid roboticsand human assistive technologies.Just as some animals can use objectsin their environments as toolsto reach into narrow spaces,here we see that Entropica,again on its own initiative,was able to move a large
disk representing an animalaround so as to cause a small disk,representing a tool, to reach into a confined spaceholding a third diskand release the third disk
from its initially fixed position.This tool use ability will have applicationsfor smart manufacturing and agriculture.In addition, just as some other animalsare able to cooperate by pulling
opposite ends of a ropeat the same time to release food,here we see that Entropica is able to accomplisha model version of that task.This cooperative ability has interesting implicationsfor economic planning and a variety of other fields.

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Entropica is broadly applicableto a variety of domains.For example, here we see it successfullyplaying a game of pong against itself,illustrating its potential for gaming.Here we see Entropica orchestratingnew connections on a social networkwhere friends are constantly falling out of touchand successfully keeping
the network well connected.This same network orchestration abilityalso has applications in health care,energy, and intelligence.Here we see Entropica directing the pathsof a fleet of ships,successfully discovering and
utilizing the Panama Canalto globally extend its reach from the Atlanticto the Pacific.By the same token, Entropicais broadly applicable to problemsin autonomous defense, logistics and transportation.

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Alex Wissner-Gross: So what you've just seenis that a variety of signature human intelligentcognitive behaviorssuch as tool use and walking uprightand social cooperationall follow from a single equation,which drives a systemto maximize its future freedom of action.

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Now, there's a profound irony here.Going back to the beginningof the usage of the term robot,the play "RUR,"there was always a conceptthat if we developed machine intelligence,there would be a cybernetic revolt.The machines would rise up against us.One major consequence of this workis that maybe all of these decades,we've had the whole concept of cybernetic revoltin reverse.It's not that machines first become intelligentand then megalomaniacaland try to take over the world.It's quite the opposite,that the urge to take controlof all possible futuresis a more fundamental principlethan that of intelligence,that general intelligence may in fact emergedirectly from this sort of control-grabbing,rather than vice versa.

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Another important consequence is goal seeking.I'm often asked, how does the ability to seek goalsfollow from this sort of framework?And the answer is, the ability to seek goalswill follow directly from thisin the following sense:just like you would travel through a tunnel,a bottleneck in your future path space,in order to achieve many otherdiverse objectives later on,or just like you would investin a financial security,reducing your short-term liquidityin order to increase your wealth over the long term,goal seeking emerges directlyfrom a long-term driveto increase future freedom of action.

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Finally, Richard Feynman, famous physicist,once wrote that if human civilization were destroyedand you could pass only a single concepton to our descendantsto help them rebuild civilization,that concept should bethat all matter around usis made out of tiny elementsthat attract each other when they're far apartbut repel each other when they're close together.My equivalent of that statementto pass on to descendantsto help them build artificial intelligencesor to help them understand human intelligence,is the following:Intelligence should be viewedas a physical processthat tries to maximize future freedom of actionand avoid constraints in its own future.